Some people think that HTML e-mail is wonderful, others think that HTML e-mail is inefficient when not annoying or hazardous and that it ought to be eschewed. PowerMail is for those of the latter school. It can be set to safely ignore HTML within the program but if the formatting must be seen, clicking on an icon will display the message within a web browser. All in all, I have found this to be the most convenient way of dealing with the stuff.

PowerMail's IMAP capability is limited but as a POP client it is exceptional. I have found no other POP client that can do so much with such ease and efficiency, no matter how many messages are stored. Compared to Apple's Mail, it is more responsive, more straightforward for novice users and more versatile for advanced ones. The only way Mail is superior, as a POP client, is that Mail's spam filtering, although less powerful potentially, does not require specifying a lot of rules.

Overall, PowerMail seems to have fewer bugs than Mail but in recent releases its address book has been unstable--I recommend the option to use Apple's address book by default--and it cannot cope with network glitches if its database is located on another computer and accessed by ethernet. This is not a suitable product for systems that keep the user's files on a central server.

This release fixes some bugs and ameliorates--somewhat--PowerMail's most glaring deficiency, which is its documentation. The documentation has now been improved from woeful to marginal. It still does not explain, for instance, PowerMail's unusual approach toward searching, which attempts, I think with some success, to provide the functionality of Boolean operators to users who do not cope well with Boolean logic. (Multiple words include an implicit "or", relevance scores applied to results incorporate an implicit "and probably", and searching on the results is equivalent to "and". Since all searches are indexed, successive searching is practical.)

Although PowerMail uses its own proprietary data structures, it allows easy importing from and exporting to all standard formats and several proprietary ones. It also incorporates suitable tools for repairing those data structures.

A few weeks ago I moved out of PowerMail into Apple's Mail because my wife and I had begun to keep a common address book synchronized over a number of computers, and I could not get PowerMail's address book to synchronize properly with Apple's. Using Mail felt like driving a Mazda after a Mercedes, so with this release, I tried PowerMail again. This time, however, instead of merging my address books, as I had done before, I scrapped my old PowerMail address book and started afresh by importing Apple's entire. Then the synchronization worked properly and I could see what was going in. It seems to be necessary to keep all contacts in the folder PowerMail creates called "Apple Address Book Contacts". Now I have, with pleasure, moved back in.